Ch 40: Duel
Lucien looked at Melissa, who was clumsily standing in front of him, ready to strike on the count of three. Her face still carried the remains of tear-streaked lines she had tried to rub off previously but had not managed to clean completely. It was a mess. Her eyes still glistened with the last remnants of tears. Her golden hair, which had previously been pulled into a neat single ponytail, was now loosening, strands slipping free one by one. Lucien felt the instinctive desire to walk over and comb her hair properly and wash her face with a jug of water, but he resisted the urge. He had to remind himself that he could only do that for himself. Others had to clean themselves on their own, and it was not something he should concern himself with.
Lucien had often found himself remarking on others' appearances when they had not taken good care of themselves, a habit born from his deep obsession with cleanliness and tidiness, and now that he looked through the lens of Evan, he understood just how much of an ass he had always been. But he never felt any remorse for it. Because looking at them made his skin crawl, so it was only natural for him to tell them to tend to themselves rather than sit with the churning feeling in his own stomach.
And that same feeling was returning to him now, the sharp urge to shout at Melissa to go and wash her face with water and comb her hair properly, and if possible change the uniform that still carried the remains of dust from her earlier sitting on the ground. But he did not. Partly because it was not the right moment, as he wanted to end the duel quickly and then go and knock on the door of the vice headmistress to ask why he had no classes for the day. And partly because the conflicting nature of Evan was reining him back from saying something as blunt as have you looked at yourself in the mirror to Melissa.
He also knew it was not the right thing to say to a girl who was so kind and naive, innocent as a child, right before a battle. It would look as though he was deliberately crushing her morale before the fight had even begun.
And soon enough, the duel would begin. So, he held his reign.
Just as he had expected, Professor Max, who had previously stepped between Lucien and Melissa, raised his right hand high into the air, and with a booming shout of "One, two, three, start!" sliced his hand downward through the air in a sharp vertical motion, marking the beginning of the duel.
Lucien stood still with his left hand tucked into his pocket and his right hand gripping firmly onto the sword he had taken from the weapons rack. He could have used his own sword, Darkness, but since he had not given Melissa a proper weapon yet, it did not feel right to use something so overwhelmingly powerful against a girl who had picked a Common ranked wand from the rack. The sword he had selected was also Common ranked, which meant they both stood on equal ground.
"I will not go easy on you," Melissa said, her voice carrying a venomous edge. Almost immediately after, she conjured a large golden-yellow sphere in front of her and hurled it toward him. Like a scorching ball of heat it flew at him with incredible speed, which he found quite remarkable coming from a girl who had mostly practiced healing. Has she been trained before? Was her brother the one who had taught her this?
Lucien cut the golden-yellow sphere cleanly in half and it dissipated at once, losing its form as soon as the structure was broken. It turned out to be nothing more than a solid ball of mana with no additional properties, no heat, no lethal shaping, nothing that could have left any meaningful damage behind. Just raw mana condensed and thrown. Perhaps I overestimated her.
"Is this all you can do?" Lucien taunted her.
The words made her flare up instantly with anger, creases forming on her forehead and her nose wrinkling as she hit the floor with her hand. Immediately she summoned multiple spheres of golden light, smaller than the first but more compact, the numbers growing rapidly as she pushed them out one after another. Five, six, the count kept climbing until she had summoned a whopping twelve spheres in total, and then she sent them all hurtling toward him.
Nice.
Lucien, without so much as shifting his feet, abiding by the promise that he would not move from his place until one minute, began slicing through each one of them with ease, cutting through them the way a knife glides through butter. The spheres were nothing more than condensed balls of mana and they came at him one by one rather than all at once. It was nothing more than child's play, the kind of technique learned when a child first began to sense mana, the stage known as Mana-Touched, the very first step in the long journey of mastering mana and learning to cast spells. The spells available at the Mana-Touched stage were called Tier 0, and they consisted mostly of learning to feel mana, slowly forming the core, and bending mana into different shapes. That was all there was to it. If the core was successfully formed and had grown to roughly the size of a child's fist, the child would advance to Apprentice rank, at which point the core would deepen in color to a dark hue and settle at the size of a fist. As a mage climbed through the ranks, both the color and the size of the core would continue to change.
"Is this your best? A Tier 0 spell at Elite [Upper] Rank? How laughable," Lucien mocked her again, and Melissa clenched her hand tightly around the wand in response.
"I can do better than this," she shouted at him.
With her eyes shut, she immediately began flaring her wand upward toward the sky, her face draining of color as she started forming a massive sphere of mana directly above her head. The very air around it seemed to crack and splinter. She was adding heat to it, the kind of additional property that would classify the spell as Tier 2, and the sphere's shape began to shift, stretching and narrowing until it formed a pointed cone with a sharp tip aimed directly at him.
Shit.
Without another thought, he dashed from his position. The entire crowd gasped in shock. He reappeared behind Melissa and struck her at the back of the neck with a precise, measured blow. The girl crumpled immediately, her consciousness slipping away, and her spell dissipated above her, leaving the sky bare and still as if nothing had happened at all.
To think you could manage something like that, even while wearing the bracelet. You truly amazed me.
Lucien's eyes drifted to Melissa's wrist where the mana-restricting bracelet sat. She had only been drawing on thirty percent of her total mana capacity, and if he had not stopped her when he did, the girl would have cracked her own core. She had pushed herself well beyond her limits, and her manapaths had already begun to puncture under the strain.
If I had been even a little slower, she would have lost her ability to use mana altogether.
Professor Max, who had been standing frozen at the side throughout the duel, blinked slowly as if coming back to himself. With visible reluctance, he raised his right hand and brought it down in a sharp vertical slash. "Melissa wins the duel," he announced, his voice carrying the same tension that had settled over the entire crowd.
Melissa had won the duel against Lucien.
The whole crowd erupted in gasps at the announcement. Lucien paid no attention to the result. There was something far more urgent in front of him. The girl needed to be seen by a healer as quickly as possible. Even though she carried the blessing of the Goddess of Light, which should allow her body to heal naturally given time, having a proper healer treat her would be significantly faster, and from the look of her blood-drained face, she was going to need a great deal of high-ranking potions alongside that healing.
Lucien shook his head slowly at her sheer determination, the way she had pushed herself all the way to a bitter and reckless edge. He bent his knee, gathered her into his arms, and lifted her into a princess carry, then walked out of the training field under the watchful and stunned gazes of everyone around him.
***
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